Every time I post an ad to Craigslist, I immediately get text messages from scammers. It is almost instantaneous, which means that they are using bots.

However, their latest pitch is rather clever. They claim that they want to verify that I am not a scammer, so therefore they are going to send me a verification code, which I should send back to them. This makes very little sense if you think about it, but what they are trying to do is connect to my email account and use the the forgot password feature to send a passcode to my phone. Then if I send them the code they get access to my email. How this does them any good I'm not entirely sure about, but I suppose they could use the account to spam or propagate other scams.

Just based on the craigslist ad, I'm not sure how they know what my email account is.